A Northern Girl Comes Home

Coronavirus Theatre Club

While I am desperately missing going to the theatre, I have been hugely impressed by how fast individuals and organisations have managed to get things online. In some cases of course this just involves making their archives available, giving you a chance to see productions you loved or missed, but a whole load of others are creating original work and getting it out there, either to keep in practice, give people a chance to get exposure, or to ensure some kind of paid work for creatives while the theatres are closed.

Coronavirus Theatre Club is one such group of individuals putting new work online. Drawing on a pool of writers, actors and directors, they post livestreamed monologues on their Twitter at 7pm every Sunday (though you can watch them later) and put them on their YouTube channel. Most are between 5-10 minutes long so you can enjoy them even if, like me, your attention span has gone AWOL in lockdown (though the ones I watched on Sunday included 3 cleverly layered and interlinked pieces called Otherly Love by Brian Lonsdale.) Most are funny – albeit sometimes darkly so – though I found Matt Gurr’s Alone Time (about a young gay man, played by Jamie Faulkes, who got stuck in lockdown with his parents days after coming out) to be quite moving as well.

Give them a follow @clubcoronavirus to see their shows or to answer their call outs to get involved.